Friday, December 30, 2016

Sponsored Post: Experiencing Trusts and Estates

We’re delighted to have the chance to talk about a casebook that we have forthcoming from West Academic in its Experiencing Series. The key idea behind the books in the Experiencing Series is to incorporate more experiential lessons than the typical casebook. While seemingly all casebooks are making that move these days, trusts and estates lends itself to this approach in particular. We are building on the really terrific teaching materials that have been out for decades now in trusts and estates by keeping many of the well-known cases and building out more documents and some of the key issues that students who will be in small firms will likely face on a regular basis.

We start Experiencing Trusts and Estates with planning for the physical act of death -- that is, planning for durable powers for attorney for health care and for financial matters. We introduce right up front those very basic documents, and the statutes that govern them, to give students a sense of what those documents look like, how they can prepare them using statutory precedents, and some of the problems that attend (particularly) durable powers of attorney for financial matters. Then we introduce the basics of the estate and gift tax regime and the basics of the probate process. All this material gives students a 360-degree view of the field and gets them ready for lessons in the drafting and execution of wills and trusts. Our focus is to introduce students to planning documents and to see how those documents (like spendthrift trusts) are written and interpreted. One of our hopes is that this approach prepares students with the vocabulary and the basic understanding of how documents relate to the more esoteric wills and trust doctrines that they’re learning about. And to make things a little more entertaining, we draw a lot of examples from “wills of the stars” -- from George Washington to Elvis, Michael Jackson, Katherine Hepburn, and Whitney Houston. Experiencing Trusts and Estates will be published this spring and available for fall 2017 classes.